What Will the Young Men Do?
Author on peak oil James William Kunstler answers this question from the context of social, cultural and environmental collapse the 1% of the 1% are strenuously engineering to bring about. This article shows his courage in taking on a theme that all mainstream media and punditry completely ignore: what will specifically young men do, especially those in flyover and rural areas, when they all finally figure out the economic game is utterly rigged against them. His prediction, which I find compelling, does not paint a pretty picture:
“I played fiddle at a small-town, country dance last night with several other musicians and it was a merry enough time because that kind of self-made music has the power to fortify spirits. About half the dancers were over 40 and the rest were teenage girls. The absence of young men was conspicuous. Toward the end of the evening, it was just girls dancing with girls. A wonderful and fundamental tension was not present in the room. The young men are out there somewhere in the country towns, but this society increasingly has no use or no place for them, except in the army. There is absolutely no public conversation about the near total devaluation of young men in the economic and social life of the USA, though there is near-hysterical triumphalism about the success of young women in every realm from sports to politics to business, and to go with that an equal amount of valorization for people who develop an ambiguous sexual identity…
“…Of course, the idea that higher education can lift a population out of this vortex of anomie is a cruel joke, especially now with the college loan racket parasitizing that flickering wish to succeed, turning young people into debt donkeys. The shelf-life of that particular set of lies and swindles will hit its sell-by date soon in a massive debt repudiation — and the nation will come to marvel at the mendacious system it allowed itself to get sucked into. But this still only begs the question of what young men will do in such a deceitful system. My guess is that they will shift their attention and activity from the mind-slavery of the current Potemkin economy to the very monster we find ourselves fighting overseas: a domestic ISIS-style explosion of wrath wrapped in an extreme ideology of one kind or another replete with savagery and vengeance-seeking. The most dangerous thing that any society can do is invalidate young men. When the explosion of youthful male wrath occurs in the USA, it will come along at exactly the same time as all the other benchmarks of order become unmoored — especially the ones in money and politics — which will shatter the faith of the non-young and the non-male, too. Also, just imagine for a moment the numbers of young men America has trained with military skills the past 20 years. Not all of them will be disabled with PTSD, or mollified with rinky-dink jobs at the Wal-Mart, or lost in the transports of heroin and methedrine. The authorities will have no way to understand what is happening and we are certain to endure a long season of violence and social chaos as a result.”
More:
Phi Beta Iota: The US Government — corrupt politicians, craven senior executives, and good-hearted but timid bureaucrats — does not give a rat's ass about the public interest. All three groups focus on their own survival — keep the bribes going, keep the post-retirement job opportunities alive, keep the drone job because there is no other job to be had. In this context it should not surprise us that the US Government has no idea that it is facing the real potential of a very violent revolution led by young men who have nothing to lose. Anyone with a modicum of education who take the trouble to examine the preconditions of revolution will quickly conclude that there are four “big” reasons for a violent revolution: the concentration of wealth, the loss of faith in government, rising food prices, and the unemployment of young men. Missing is the precipitant. It's appearance is assured.
See Also:
Chris Hedges: Time for Professional Revolutionaries
Eagle: Practical Guide to Collapse and Revolution
Graphic: Preconditions of Revolution in the USA Today
Review: Beautiful Trouble — A Toolbox for Revolution
Stephen E. Arnold: Predictive Analytics, Food Prices, Revolution
